In this section we will cover tense, aspect/voice and mood; we will also cover how to form adjectives and adverbs from a simple verb.
Tense tells your reader, and indeed yourself, in what time period the events you describe take place. It is important that the tense of your work be appropriate, and consistent. Below you will find a table describing the tenses, and what they mean; below that, you will find a few examples of each tense, given in a sentence so that you may know in what context you may use each tense.
Common Tenses for verb "to answer" (this form of the verb - to [blank] - is called the infinitive because it has no tense or time).
Examples:
Present Tenses
Past Tenses
The imperfect or continuous past tense is usually used in conjunction with the simple past simple tense, and denotes an incomplete, continual, or habitual action in the past.
The pluperfect tense is usually used in conjunction with other past tenses, and is used to show an action further in the past than the main action.
Future Tenses
The future perfect is less common. Its other name the future in the past helps explain its use: it shows that of two future actions, one will clearly happen before the other.
It is important that you always be aware what tense you are writing in, because your tense should stay consistent unless you are deliberately shifting from one tense to another, like when a character using a present tense narrative has a flashback to previous events or in conversation. When proofreading, make sure to check your tenses, you should not have random shifts, they should be purposeful.
Voice
Sentences in English can be written in either the active or passive voice. The active voice is preferable and more effective for most uses, and so you should write mostly, if not totally in the active voice. You might use the passive voice in a dialog (where such expression is appropriate to the character) or in official news or scientific reports where the subject is deliberately being de-emphasised or removed altogether because of the unbiased nature of the writing, because it does not matter who did the action, or because the speaker is trying to minimise responsibility for the action.
For example, active voice sentences include:
Passive voice examples:
Mood
A verb not only has two aspects/voices, but also two moods. The technical terms for these moods are indicative and subjunctive. The indicative is the mood that is used most often - the majority of this course is written in the indicative mood. Unlike French, or Latin for example, English does not use the subjunctive mood to a large extent. In fact, it is a nearly obsolete form in the English language. However, there are certain cases where a subjunctive is used, and it is well to know which these cases are. Note the following: